Welcome to GeekFest 2017, a series of interviews featuring ICT4D thought leaders. Our goals for our #geekfest2017 interviews are 1. to highlight the people and organizations who are pushing the field in new directions, 2. feature their work and show how it’s different or new, and 3. to support the overall growth of the ICT4D community.

This week I chat with Alexandra “Alex” Tyers, Co-Founder and Director at Panoply Digital. Alex is a mobiles for development (M4D) professional, specializing in monitoring and evaluation for innovation, mobile learning in emerging markets, and women’s mobile and ICT access and use. Alex recently spoke at our Frontiers in Digital Inclusion Event in London on the importance of gender-disaggregated data for digital access and inclusion.

1. Why does gender-disaggregated data matter?

Well, we all know that there is global gender inequality, and that inequalities in the physical world are being replicated in the digital world. Globally, a woman is 14 percent less likely to own a mobile phone than a man, but this is much higher in certain regions: 38 percent in South Asia, 45 percent in a country such as Niger. We also see similar trends in access to the internet. A woman is 50 percent less likely to be online than a man in the same education and income group. There is also a growing gender gap in usage. Even if a woman does have access to a mobile phone or the internet, she tends to use them differently than men—less frequently, more use of basic services such as voice, and less use of complex services such as mobile internet or mobile money.

With the international development sector’s increasing use of mobile and ICT as a vehicle to deliver services, we run the risk of exacerbating this global inequality, particularly if we use mobile services without understanding and addressing the digital gender divide.

The first step towards closing this gender digital divide is understanding it. To do this, I would argue that we need more gender-disaggregated geographic data to help us get a better understanding of (and evidence of) women’s access to and use of ICT. This data can identify barriers to access and use of technology and inform development programming.

2. How can gender-disaggregated data help us design better programs?

This gender data gap is an issue, and it does affect program design if people don’t understand how women use and experience ICT from the beginning and at a community level.

Say, for example, we have an education program in Chad and we want to include a mobile money component to either encourage people to save money for school fees or to reduce corruption and theft by removing physical currency from the transaction. In this case, it would be important to know how many women in the community have access to a mobile phone, and which types they use. Do we know how many women have a mobile money account, or what they use their mobile money account for? Do we know whether women make transactions by themselves, or with the help of an agent? What cultural practices in their community might affect their access to mobile or their use?

We may know a little bit about the women in general, but if we don’t know about their mobile access and use, we run the risk of designing a digital component of a program that doesn’t meet the needs of female users as well as men. Having this gender-disaggregated data and insights at a community or subnational level can help us anticipate barriers women face, and work towards overcoming them to ensure they are included in any digital component.

3. Is there a lot of gender-disaggregated data out there?

Unfortunately, no. There is a general lack of reliable gender-disaggregated data, a lack of standardised data, and the data sets that do exist are often fragmented. Although this is slowly changing, thanks to excellent reports and data from people such as the Web Foundation and GSMA Connected Women. However, this can be time consuming and expensive to collect, and a lot of the larger studies on this topic are already outdated. In addition, the limited gender-disaggregated national statistics that exist are not indicative of every community. We really do need to know how people, especially women, interact with technology at a community level.

4. How can we go about getting this data then?

I’m glad you asked! In an effort to address this gap USAID Digital Inclusion recently commissioned the Gender and ICT Survey Toolkit, which I co-authored alongside Katie Highet and Hannah Skelly from FHI360.

The Toolkit facilitates the collection of gender-disaggregated information with a series of resources, including survey questions, focus group discussion guides, and technical competence tests, as well as instruction on research design and data sorting. It’s designed to be user-friendly, practical, and to be used by everyone—not just academics and monitoring and evaluation experts.

Through this resource, we’re hoping to enable a more data-driven (and gender disaggregated data-driven) approach to ICT4D implementation, and in doing so, help to close the digital gender divide.

I am typing this out from Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi reflecting on the past week spent with the good people of UN Habitat, specifically those associated with the CityRAP tool. The CityRAP tool trains city managers and municipal technicians in small to intermediate sized cities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to understand and plan actions aimed at reducing risk and building resilience through the elaboration of a City Resilience Action Plan.

A few caveats at the onset here. This reads a bit more like an academic piece which it largely is. It is drawn from something larger I wrote a bit ago for another paper. It might also read like an attack on the SDGs, which is not my point. The point here is that the SDGs have generated some incredible results and I sincerely support them, but we must be mindful of what is being mobilised in our pursuit of them. My focus is education and I suggest that the provisions of the SDGs related specifically to that field suggest particular scaled interventions (or at least make those approaches particularly attractive). Scale exacts pressure on particular types of education.

As part of my association with the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh (a version of this post appears there as well), I recently traveled with colleagues to deliver a three day workshop on digital education for Syrian academics who have been displaced by the conflict. The University has worked for a long time with the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), a great organisation providing urgently-needed help to academics in immediate danger, those forced into exile, and many who choose to work on in their home countries despite serious risks.

We seem to have endless ideas on how to use Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). From job creation to women’s empowerment to civic participation, a number of ICT4D interventions have been developed and implemented over the years. Common question asked in my work is “what type of technology that might have biggest impact in our society in the coming years?”. As we have learned, ICTs in itself aren’t sufficient. While factors contributing to the success of ICT4D have become apparent, and many have written about them, I feel there's still a need to highlight some of them.

We have been some of the most vocal critics of Bridge International Academies (BIA), largely because most investigations and evaluations of their edtech impact to improve schooling in sub-Saharan Africa have been less than spectacular (many would say the impact is non-existent). So imagine our surprise to see Wayan Vota's latest ICTworks™ post highlighting the successes of BIA in Liberia.

We need to make women in innovation more visible, and correct the gender imbalance in the stories we tell. We need to tell more stories about the women working at the top of humanitarian innovation, and so today I sat down with Tanya Accone, Senior Advisor at UNICEF Innovation, to tell the story of a woman working at the top of a very visible humanitarian innovation team for a very visible humanitarian agency.

We do a lot of work on open learning as well and it was clear there was tension between these open educational platforms (like Coursera, edX, etc.) and their use in local contexts, particularly in emerging economies. There is tension there. Open educational technologies are too often framed as a transparent instrument for educational export, keeping (specifically Western or Global North) curricula, pedagogy, and educational values intact whilst they are broadcast to a global population in deficit.

I remember when I first started hearing the buzz about bots. My first thought? 'Here we go again...' - a reaction to the endless cycles of hype followed by business-as-usual that typifies the digital sector. However, over the past few months I've had the opportunity to design a few 'bots 4 good', and I'd like to share what I've learned: how they work, what they could be useful for, and where to start if you'd like to get one. I believe that done well, they could be really useful add-ons to your digital strategy as they provide a rich 'in-between' space for mobile users who aren't fully digitally literate.

Last week, I was at TICTeC 2018 where researchers, activists and practitioners discussed the impact of civic technology, or civic tech. This blogpost summarises the discussion of Two heads are better than one: working with governments.